I spent an entire summer reading, and I only waited two years to write about it

Here's a fact: I have read all of the 86 Newbery Award winners except the two most recent (so...84), and I have only really enjoyed 13:

Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray
Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Clearly
The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia McLachlan
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

A few (Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and Shiloh) I enjoyed fiercely in fifth grade (or so), but no longer care for. A few others I know I loved when I read them, but I can't really remember them (Adam of the Road, Maniac Magee). A few of the remaining seven I only read recently (The Hero and the Crown, The Tale of Despereaux, The Bronze Bow), but the rest I have loved fiercely since before I hit puberty (A Wrinkle in Time, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Giver, Sarah, Plain and Tall--this one I've loved since the first grade, as Mrs. Stroker was obsessed with it).

I would also just like to add how much it burns me that pretty much every book in the Little House series is a Newbery Honor book, but Laura Ingalls Wilder never won the big award. Pretty much every year one of her books was an honor book, it was better than the winner. Since I've read all the books in question, I can say that. Fortunately, Mrs. Wilder earned herself her own damn award for children's literature, so I guess she came out all right in the end.

Nerdily enough, there are also a few more honor books that I loved fiercely more than the winner: Rascal by Sterling North and A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle are up at the top of that list.

Here's an awesome thing: E.L. Konigsburg, one of the few double-Newbery authors, not only is a double-Newbery author, but the year From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler won, another of her books was an honor book. Unfortunately, the book in question, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth is not that good. (Of course I read it--I don't call myself a book nerd for nothin'.) Also, I think all of the double-Newberys are women (Katherine Paterson, E.L. Konigsburg, and Lois Lowry are the ones I know off the top of my head).

A few of these books, these so-called winners, I hated just as fiercely as I loved A Wrinkle in Time. I know! It makes me weep, but seriously. No one ever needs to read the first winner, The Story of Mankind, or Smoky the Cowhorse, which I know I bitched about during the Great Newbery Summer of '05 in my livejournal. Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars will forever be loathsome to me, but I can't say if it's because the book or the writing or what was bad. It has been irredeemably tainted by one hideous sixth-grade literature unit, in which I earned the wrath of Mrs. Chernoff by reading ahead and then having to do all ensuing "pick a partner! now pick someone you haven't worked with before!" activities that corresponded with each chapter with Rachel Baker, the only other literate person in sixth grade, apparently. (Just kidding, all you New Searles class of '96-ers. Rachel and I were just nerds. But you can suck it, Mrs. Chernoff.)

I have spoken of my irrational hatred of Bridge to Terabithia, but it made a cute movie--and it wasn't really all that bad of a book. I'm just a huge geek. But Katherine Paterson's other winner, Jacob Have I Loved, I loathed. I tried to read it before the GNS of '05, but I couldn't. It was only because I had a goal that I got through it. And guess which book was an honor book the year that crapola won? That's right. A Ring of Endless Light, which is pretty much the book I've read most in my life. I do not agree with the decision to give Katherine Paterson two Newberys and Madeleine L'Engle only one. Also, this is kind of where my desire to be a children's librarian came from--I want to be on the Newbery panel. Like, really badly. Badly enough to go back to school for two years? I don't know...

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin I also hated, but I can't remember why. I had to read it for school, which may have had something to do with it. Why did that always have such an effect on me? I didn't stop hating books I had to read until college. And the only people who survived that anyway were Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Oh, and Shakespeare and Chaucer. Also, strangely enough, I didn't hate Middlemarch, though I do hate everything else Ms. Mary Ann Evans has ever written. (So I haven't read everything, but Adam Bede and Silas Marner sucked rocks, okay?) Oh! Ivanhoe was pretty awesome. And I guess The Great Gatsby wasn't as bad as I thought it was in eleventh grade.

Here's another thing: in 1953, Charlotte's Web was an honor book, and Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark won. Now, I read this book a mere two years ago, and I have no idea what it's about--and I have a feeling no one else has ever heard of it (except, of course, children's librarians). Clearly, that was a mistake, as Charlotte's Web, though not one of my faves, has proven to be a classic.

I found this occurrence rather odd: Twice, the Newbery was given to a book in the middle of a series: The Grey King by Susan Cooper and The High King by Lloyd Alexander, which was the last book in the series. So naturally, during the GNS of '05, I read these books out of context. Sadly, neither of them was interesting enough to get me to read the rest of the series, though The Grey King was more compelling.

Okay, that's all. I had no idea all that was kicking around up in my head.